29 Mar 2021, 09:00

A man received funds from a disability support services provider to cover respite care for his daughter, who had a disability and was under 16 years of age. His ex-wife and mother of the child requested and received information from the disability support services provider about the respite care that was funded while the daughter was in the father’s custody.

The man felt that the information about the respite care was primarily personal information about him and that the agency should not have provided it to his ex-wife.

This complaint raised issues under and Rules 6 and 11 of the Health Information Privacy Code 1994 (HIPC) as well as section 22F(1) of the Health Act 1956.

Was the information “health information”?

The HIPC broadly defines “health information” to also include information about services incidental to the care or support of people with disabilities.

Since the respite care funded by the disability services provider was a service incidental to the care of a person with disabilities, information about that care came within the definition of “health information.”

Was the mother a “representative”?

Section 22F(1) of the Health Act 1956 requires agencies who hold health information of any kind to provide that information to an individual requesting it, or to their representative. In the case of a child under 16 years old, the parent is the child’s “representative.”

One effect of this is that, under Rule 11(4) of the HIPC, access requests made by a representative are to be treated as if they were a request by the individual under Rule 6. Since the child was under 16 years old, the mother was entitled to make a request for the information in these circumstances as the child’s representative.

In those circumstances, the agency was obliged to provide the information, unless it believed the child did not want the information to be disclosed.

We understood the man’s concerns that his ex-wife would find out when he had received respite care for his daughter. However, in our view, the information about the respite care was mixed information about the daughter and the father, not just information about the father. Therefore, as a representative of the child, the mother was entitled to request it.

We advised the man that we did not consider that there had been a breach of the HIPC and closed our file.